Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

I agree the Queen sounds stilted and unnatural, but do you think that is because she is making a speech when we hear her, and she wants to be clear and understood? Perhaps she speaks differently when not in public, it would certainly make sense to.
By the way, I don`t understand your last comment regarding "common". Is class an issue for you?

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

No dear class isn't an issue for me at all, considering my parents would have considered themselves upper middle class and a cousin of the Queen lived next door to us when I was a child!

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

For punctuation purists, I hope all have read the marvellous book:Eats, Shoots and Leaves!

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species.

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled.

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

I thought Eats Shoots and Leaves was a book about a giraffe DM - shows how wrong you can be. I agree with both you and Plantman, I think correct grammar and punctuation are important and often ignored or wrongly applied.

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

I was taught to speak 'correctly' and in turn taught my children to do so. I also correct my grandchildren if they don't articulate properly. However, although important speech is not the be all and end all, a kind heart is much more to be prized, imo.

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

What an awful, patronising, contradictory post!

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

What was patronising about that true statement? You asked me if I had a problem with class, by which I took you to mean upper class, and I was saying I hadn't! Judging by some of your posts I suspect you might have a problem with the lower orders!

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

I`m frankly amazed that you need this to be explained, but here we go:
It is patronising in the way that you started your reply by calling me "Dear", as though I was one of your children. Your arrogance is breathtaking.
It is contradictory because you deny having an issue with class, then immediately tell me what your supposed class is, and then in a susequent post you speak of "the lower orders".
The contradiction then, is that you are obviously class obsessed!

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

Unfortunately class has always been a problem in Britain. I remember when Ford Motors were having lots of strike trouble in their English factory, but none in their similar German factory.

German bosses came to England to try to understand. They concluded that industrial strife was inevitable in England because workers and management spoke a totally different English from each other, lived in different areas, and sent their kids to different schools. Germany, for all its faults, is much more egalitarian (or at least it was back then, in the 60s and 70s)

My own Mum suffered greatly from class misunderstandings. When her father died in WW1 she was sent to boarding school because her Mum couldn't cope. This was quite posh, and she spoke with quite an upper crust accent. Then her Mum moved to Yorkshire and remarried. They were poor by this time and Mum had to come home and learn to weave in a woollen mill. Her posh accent caused her to be utterly rejected by her new workmates, so she learned to speak Yorkshire dialect as fast as she could.

Until she told me her story, I always wondered why Mum could put on the 'posh' better than anyone. Then I realised this was her normal voice.

Nowadays we accept regional accent and dialects, which is great, but my own Yorkshire accent caused me to fail my interpreters exam in 1965. My German was fine, but I was unable to put on RP English, so I failed the English side of it.

Class divisions - I hate them. But we cannot deny that they exist.

PS
Whichever variety of English my Mum used, she always got the grammar right, and was a walking dictionary when we needed to spell a difficult word. Right to the end, and she died at 94, her letters to me were word perfect.

Re: Yey! Spelling and Grammar are going to be taught again.

I was trained to be an English teacher and I have been appalled in the past by the spelling and grammar of younger colleagues and relatives. And what's with this new fashion of leaving off the final full stop? E.g. T.U.C???